Search for: [Abstract = "In essence a discursive category, heritage is currently one of the most widespread tools for developing historical policy. Supplied with the “heritage” brand by appropriate institutions certifying objects and cultural practices, heritage serves as a canvas for the creation of attractive images of the past in specific places and communities. Thanks to its persuasive power, it can successfully model the collective imagination and influence identity processes. Guarded by procedures and verifying institutions, the special symbolic and economic value of heritage becomes an element of rivalry and a source of social conflicts. An illustration of such tension is Kraków’s palimpsestic and semantically dense space, which is ordered according to a strict symbolic hierarchy. Consideration of the different treatment of Kraków’s Old Town complex, which was entered on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1978, and the socialist realist centre of Nowa Huta, which unsuccessfully pretended to the title, reveals the hidden rules governing the supposedly democratic heritage policy"]